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A comment on The Lessons For Facebook, Twitter And Reddit In Digg's Demise.

Re:The Lessons For Facebook, Twitter And Reddit In Digg's De... by gfodor on Saturday July 14, 2012 @02:51PM (#4244997)
Best point of the article is that you need to keep in mind your 'leverage' as owner of a product when implementing large scale changes. In Digg's case, the community had all the leverage: they posted links to content, curated the content, provided the pageviews for advertisers, and spent the time making the site great. In return, Digg had little leverage at all to cause users to stay if they pissed them off sufficiently.

Facebook and Twitter have leverage: their content is user-generated, and cannot be found elsewhere, this combined with their social graphs make it so if you switched you will not be seeing content from a majority of the people you know or care about any longer. Marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist have enormous leverage: eBay can push out a feature that pisses off 100% of their sellers, but sellers go where the buyers are, and the buyers are on eBay. Google has leverage over its advertisers for the same reason, though it's hard to think of how Google has leverage over its main audience, which is a testament to their cautiousness when messing with the search engine (at least until recently!)

I think this aspect is lost when you have sites like TechCrunch telling product people to just forge ahead and break stuff. Break stuff, sure, but remember that when Facebook break things and users eventually come crawling back, its certainly not due to loyalty or warm-fuzzy feelings but due to leverage. Do you have that kind of leverage?

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Re:The Lessons For Facebook, Twitter And Reddit In Digg's De... by lurchpop on Saturday July 14, 2012 @10:37PM (#4245922)
The question of leverage can be an extremely difficult question to answer honestly to oneself. that gets even harder when you have to show the press/investors that you're staying relevant and continuing to evolve. Innovation for the web tends to mean redesigns, which users hate. if you admit to yourself that users have all the leverage, then you're taking away the go-to tool to prove you're innovating. Most CEOs and product teams would rather justify they're like Facebook or Apple in their own special way and do a shiny new redesign.
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